Doth some one say that there be gods above?
There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool,
Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.
Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words
No undue credence: for I say that kings
Kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,
And doing thus are happier than those
Who live calm pious lives day after day. All divinity
Is built-up from our good and evil luck.

Bellerophon.

I sacrifice to no god save myself — And to my belly, greatest of deities.

The Cyclops (c.424-23 BC).

I care for riches, to make gifts
To friends, or lead a sick man back to health
With ease and plenty. Else small aid is wealth
For daily gladness; once a man be done
With hunger, rich and poor are all as one.

Electra (413 BC).

God helps him who strives hard.

Eumenidae.

Nothing has more strength than dire necessity.

Helen (412 BC), as translated by Richmond Lattimore

In case of dissension, never dare to judge till you've heard the other side.

Variant translation: He was a wise man who originated the idea of God.

The sweetest teaching did he introduce,
Concealing truth under untrue speech.
The place he spoke of as the gods' abode
Was that by which he might awe humans most, —
The place from which, he knew, terrors came to mortals
And things advantageous in their wearisome life —
The revolving heaven above, in which dwell
The lightnings, and awesome claps
Of thunder, and the starry face of heaven,
Beautiful and intricate by that wise craftsman Time, —
From which, too, the meteor's glowing mass speeds
And wet thunderstorm pours forth upon the earth.

Sisyphus as translated by R. G. Bury, and revised by J. Garrett

There is nothing more hostile to a city that a tyrant, under whom in the first and chiefest place, there are not laws in common, but one man, keeping the law himself to himself, has the sway, and this is no longer equal.

Suppliants.

When good men die their goodness does not perish,
But lives though they are gone. As for the bad,
All that was theirs dies and is buried with them.

A second wife is hateful to the children of the first; A viper is not more hateful.

l. 309.

Oh, if I had Orpheus' voice and poetry
with which to move the Dark Maid and her Lord,
I'd call you back, dear love, from the world below.
I'd go down there for you. Charon or the grim
King's dog could not prevent me then
from carrying you up into the fields of light.

l. 358.

Light be the earth upon you, lightly rest.

l. 462.

Old men's prayers for death are lying prayers, in which they abuse old age and long extent of life. But when death draws near, not one is willing to die, and age no longer is a burden to them.

l. 669.

Dishonour will not trouble me, once I am dead.

l. 726.

No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.

l. 783-4.

Today's today. Tomorrow we may be
ourselves gone down the drain of Eternity.

l. 788.

I have found power in the mysteries of thought,
exaltation in the changing of the Muses;
I have been versed in the reasonings of men;
but Fate is stronger than anything I have known.

Variant translation: Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

Anonymous ancient proverb, wrongly attributed to Euripides. The version here is quoted as a "heathen proverb" in Daniel, a Model for Young Men (1854) by William Anderson Scott. The origin of the misattribution to Euripides is unknown. Several variants are quoted in ancient texts, as follows.

Variants and derived paraphrases:

For cunningly of old
was the celebrated saying revealed:evil sometimes seems good
to a man whose mind
a god leads to destruction.

Sophocles, Antigone 620-3, a play pre-dating any of Euripides' surviving plays. An ancient commentary explains the passage as a paraphrase of the following, from another, earlier poet.

When a god plans harm against a man,
he first damages the mind of the man he is plotting against.

Quoted in the scholia vetera to Sophocles' Antigone 620ff., without attribution. The meter (iambic trimeter) suggests that the source of the quotation is a tragic play.

For whenever the anger of divine spirits harms someone,
it first does this: it steals away his mind
and good sense, and turns his thought to foolishness,
so that he should know nothing of his mistakes.

Attributed to "some of the old poets" by Lycurgus of Athens in his Oratio In Leocratem [Oration Against Leocrates], section 92. Again, the meter suggests that the source is a tragic play. These lines are misattributed to the much earlier semi-mythical statesman Lycurgus of Sparta in a footnote of recent editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and other works.

"Whom Jupiter wishes to destroy, he first sends mad"; neo-Latin version. "A maxim of obscure origin which may have been invented in Cambridge about 1640" -- Taylor, The Proverb (1931). Probably a variant of the line "He whom the gods love dies young", derived from Menander's play The Double Deceiver via Plautus (Bacchides 816-7).

Nor do the gods appear in warrior's armour clad
To strike them down with sword and spear
Those whom they would destroy
They first make mad.

Bhartṛhari, 7th c. AD; as quoted in John Brough,Poems from the Sanskrit, (1968), p, 67

Vinaashkaley Viparit Buddhi

Sanskrit Saying (also in Jatak katha): "When a man is to be destroyed, his intelligence becomes self-destructive."

Modern derivatives:
The proverb's meaning is changed in many English versions from the 20th and 21st centuries that start with the proverb's first half (through "they") and then end with a phrase that replaces "first make mad" or "make mad." Such versions can be found at Internet search engines by using either of the two keyword phrases that are on Page 2 and Page 4 of the webpage "Pick any Wrong Card." The rest of that webpage is frameworks that induce a reader to compose new variations on this proverb.